SXSW – Steve Meets Some Heroes

I had a chance to meet a couple heroes (newly found and previously followed) at SXSW this year.

Andy Baio

Andy (who founded upcoming.org, waxy.org) has a new project — kickstarter.com. Kickstarter really sparked my imagination this past week — it comes across as a site to help friends get creative ideas from the “tumbling in your head” phase to a funded reality.
A simple idea and extremely well executed. Andy is friendly and energetic — the perfect person to pull this off and create the super connector platform that is grounded in the reality of us wanting to see peers succeed.

Jeffrey Veen

The man who’s lead us down a path of design, typography and UX — showed us a direction and then held the lantern as we walked behind him. From the early pioneering set by Hotwired, the now defunct MeasureMap which I loved to his work on Google Analytics
to the newest foray into the 2010 @font-face reality. Thanked him for what he’s done — told him I was honestly evaluating his TypeKit.com — hoping to bring it into our workflow and to our clients. He stands at 6’ 4” but his deeds make him a giant.

Jonathan Snook

A fellow Canadian we’ve all followed. Had to say hi and thank him for the chunks he’s provided — even more so as a fellow canuck. Now at Yahoo.com and working out of Ottawa — he mentioned he was starting a series of workshops in Canada. Something I’d
love for us to attend and possibly help with in Montréal. An awesome guy — glad we stopped and met him. Check out his books and site here: